CANNIBAL CORPSE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Skewered From Ear To Eye

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1-20, 22 and 28, and 10 more places -- 32% of every bar the kit plays. That is the spine of it; everything else is what happens around it.

TEMPO
200 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
197
LENGTH
3:47
DIFFICULTY
85/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 200 BPM
SKEWERED FROM EAR TO EYE · BAR 5

It is played on ride, snare and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 27 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- and the thing that decides that is the speed of the hand keeping time.

The whole song is 85 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

How to get it under your hands

A part this hard is not learned by playing it slowly and hoping. The room opens it on its simplest reduction -- the timekeeper alone, at 150 BPM -- and adds the notes back over 3 rungs, each with a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next.

  1. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, ride pulled back to quarter notes. This is the part to know by heart.
  2. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 150, 175 and 200 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.

PRACTISE THIS BEAT →

Questions

What drum beat does Skewered From Ear To Eye use?

A one-bar groove on ride, snare and kick, in 4/4 at 200 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 32% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1-20, 22, 28 and 45-54, and 9 more places. The time is kept on the ride to start with, and it changes 11 times over the song.

Is the beat in Skewered From Ear To Eye hard?

27 out of 100 on its own -- a fair first song. The song as a whole is 85 out of 100. Hard, and what makes it hard is how many notes a second it asks for.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 197 BARS ANALYSED